Thirteenth

After a gut-wrenching Friday the 13th, this Monday the 16th, although fairly windy, has proved to be quite a pleasant day. The day is stark in contrast with its hideous counterpart—a day consisting of a test, lots of homework and one hell of a headache. Maybe this little story will explain where I’ve been.

I have this teacher—let’s call him Faggard. He’s not a fag or anything, but he does have a serious superiority complex. He always has to be right, and he’ll make up bullshit just to get people to quit asking questions. Yeah, one of those kind of professors. He assigned a project at the beginning of the semester and let us go at it with little instruction as to what we were actually trying to accomplish.

The first part of the project came together fairly easily, but right in the middle of the second part, Faggard got sick. Not like any normal sick, but surgery-complications sick. He missed three weeks. It wasn’t necessarily bad that we went three weeks without his mind-numbing class, but it was slightly disconcerting when he returned from his hiatus with a gruff “I’m sure you’ve had enough time to work on your projects now.”

Since the day he left, I had needed to meet with him to go over the damned thing, and now he expected me to have it finished? Some of the louder voices in class spoke up and told him how illogical his logic really was. His answer? A week extension.

Every damn day I went to his office and, when he didn’t skip out on me, I squeezed out information from him—the information he should have given us all up front. As a result, I was able to get my project to do something none of the others could: Work.

“So, what’s the problem then, Zachary?”

The problem is, the project wasn’t the only thing we had missed in his class. That week, we had homework, homework corrections and a test. Bam, bam, bam! On top of that, I’m taking three other classes, each of which plan and scheme to compile the force of a thousand gods all into one day pulled from the black depths of Satan’s heart—Friday the 13th.

Tuesday night I stayed up late studying for Faggard’s test. Wednesday night was another project night, staying up late with nothing but the rhythms of confused fingers on keyboards to hum along to. Thursday night was the worst, staying up until my eyelids sagged from math, then propping them open to finish devious block diagrams and transition/output charts. Then, the very next morning after a wee five hours of sleep, it was time for the day to stop the hearts of millions of weeping children.

I went through the motions in my complex variables class, hoping to God I was getting the right answers. I completely skipped my next class, choosing to finish the hellish project instead. For another three hours I worked straight on my project until it was due. I turned it in, and forgot what happened the rest of the day. Probably boring lectures followed by Super Paper Mario.

Flash forward to now. The sun is shining and the air is warm (despite the breeze), I made a whopping 96% on my complex variables test, my teacher allowed me to turn in the homework for the class I missed, no questions asked, and the steak and cheese sub that I ritually eat tasted better than ever.

I’m still about 30 minutes away from my date with Faggard and his fiendish class planning (I’ve a test on Wednesday in his class), but if the rest of the day has any impact on the future, I’ll be going home with a smile. I’m glad to be back.